If you have ever played any of the King of Fighters series of fighting games on a Neo Geo MVS arcade machine you will have noticed the odd button configuration compared to fighting games made by Capcom. The button are configured in this order light punch, light kick, strong punch, strong kick. This is uncomfortable for me, so I made this cable so I could easily swap the B and C buttons.

Friday, August 6, 2010

By now almost everyone has seen the famous "Double Rainbow" video on YouTube. When I watched it I couldn't help but hear "Rambo" everywhere he said "Rainbow". So I took the audio from that video and combined it with video I shot of Rambo playing on two TVs side-by-side. It cracks me up watching the two combined.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

This will be the first in a series blog posts about local used games stores in Capital Region of New York State.

Games A Plunder is a new game store that opened this January by its owner Michael Willman. I only just found out about this store last weekend even though it is only 4.3 miles from my house! I was actually at another games store (Pastime Legends in Scotia, NY) and the owner of that store told me about it!

The reason I missed it is because of Cobleskill's retarded despotic historical society that prohibited him for putting up a sign until they approved of it. Can you beleive that almost 6 months‽‽ Many businesses would fail if they went that long without a sign! I don't know why there is even a historical society in Cobleskill, every building is old ugly and run down. It would improve the village a thousand times if they just knocked all of those buildings down!

Well Back to the store. My first impression when I went in was I thought he didn't have much in the way of stock, that was until I saw the two additional rooms. He has a really nice collection of 70's - 80's game systems and games in great condition many in original packaging! You will never see this kind of stuff in a game stop!

I would say that the pricing seems almost random, I saw great collectable stuff complete in box for really cheap, and then I saw other items, like a ColecoVision in fair condition with no packing for $200, which is high. He could easily post some of the CIB stuff on nintendoage.com, and atariage.com and make much better money on those items than he is asking for them. I just hope that some of the more collectible stuff isn't sold to people who don't understand the value of a complete in box games. That about covers Games A Plunder, next time I post in this series will be about Pastime Legends.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

If you have a sidekick 08 and want to watch high quality video on it you will want this bash script.

When I looked online at the tutorials for converting video to the 3gp format that the sidekick supports all the output looked really bad. The resolution and bitrate was so low it wasn't worth watching. So I looked of the 3GP format standard and found that it supports other higher resolutions, but none of them fit the sidekick screen perfectly.

The solution was to convert the video to one of the higher resolution versions and pad the video with black bars in the non-displayed off screen portions.

Here is the script, you will need ffmpeg and mplayer installed, as well as the windows binary version of ffmpeg that supports encoding the 3GP format.

Please note: This script is written in Bash, meaning that it is primarily for Linux users. This could easily be converted for windows users as well. I may do that in the future if I get enough requests. If you want a windows version, send me a tweet

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Please note, I have made major edits to the lists and improved them as of 01/28/2010.

If you are a follower of my Blog, you know that back in June I got a Neo Geo MVS arcade game. It is a unique arcade game system becasue the games are stored on cartridges like home game systems. This made updating a lot easier for Arcade operators.

My Neo Geo is a 4 slot, meaning that it can hold 4 games at a time and the player can select which game they wish to play. I have 3 games in my Neo Geo, but wouldn't it be great to have even more? That is where the Crazy Chinese manufactures come in. Leave it to them to take a dead system that is no longer in arcades and produce a multi cart for it!

Now there isn't just one multi cart, but 9 different versions each with different amount of games in them:

Please note that while I am linking to excellentcom.net for the cartridges above, I am not endorsing them, in fact I am buying mine from a different seller.

This becomes a very difficult decision because the game lists for these cartridges are a mess, spelling errors, different order, Japanese/English titles. To help me decide which to get I made a chart that give a visual comparison of the games that are and are not in each cartridge.

You may notice that in this list there are games like "Double Dragon" and "Double Dragon +" I am not sure what the difference is, but if it is anything like the NES multicarts, they are the same game, but the '+' version has a slight modification like easier play, jump higher, etc. I am going to make another list that ignores these slight differences to show exactly what games you are getting in these carts. For now this list is much more useful for selecting a Multicart.

Update January 28, 2010:

Below are two new documents a of 01/28/2010 that use the list of official Neo Geo games, it is much more useful for filtering out the ROM hacks:

Here it is sorted by rarity of game in the Multi Carts, the more carts it is in the higher it is in the list:

Saturday, January 16, 2010

I was at Richie Rich's Place today and the owner tells me that he has been saving something for me, I glance over the counter and see a 3do! Now, when these things came out in 1993 i didn't have the $699.95 to buy one, but my friend Patrick did.

I remember all the fun we had playing Road Rash, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo, and most importantly Star Control 2! Star Control 2 is still on of the most awesome games I have ever played. I had the Genesis version (Star Control 1) and the PC version. But the 3do version was the best because of the voice acting that was added. The source code for the 3do version has been released to open source and is called "The Ur-Quan Masters" due to the name being still owned by Atari. It was the most fun on the 3do.

I also scored a Panasonic 19" 15khz color monitor! It will be great for retro game systems!